Università degli Studi di Padova
Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari
Corso di Laurea Magistrale in
Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e la Cooperazione Internazionale
Classe LM-38
Tesi di Laurea
Relatore
Prof.ssa Anna Scacchi
Laureanda Elena Gazzi n° matr.1211401 / LMLCC
Representation and self-representation of
blackness: the case of Rachel Dolezal
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 5
Chapter 1
THE REPRESENTATION OF BLACKNESS 11
1. The concept of race 12
1.1. Post-racial theory and colorblindness 13
1.2. The paradox of race 15
2. Visuality and race 16
2.1. Critical studies of race and visual culture studies 17
2.2. Race as medium 19
3. The scopic regime of race 20
3.1. Naturalization 22
3.2. Hypervisibility 23
3.3. Whiteness as the norm and white privilege 24
4. The construction of the Other 25
4.1. The Fanonian moment and double consciousness 26 4.2. Stereotyping and the representation of Otherness 27
5. Representations of blackness 31
5.1. Enlightenment and scientific racism 32
5.2. Plantation slavery 35
5.3. Anti-slavery imagery 40
5.4. After emancipation 42
5.5. The legacy of racial stereotypes in contemporary US society 43 Chapter 2
SELF-REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS 45
1. Regaining power over identity 46
1.1. Second sight 46
1.2. The struggle over the gaze and the right to look 47 1.3. Contesting a racialized regime of representation 50 2. Alternative representations of blackness between 19th and early 20th
century
52
2.1. Sojourner Truth 53
2.2. Frederick Douglass 55
2.3. W.E.B. Du Bois’s photographs for the 1900 Paris Exhibition 57
3. Counterstrategies and their limitations 60
3.1. Realism and authenticity 61
3.2. Positive and negative images 62
3.3. Confronting mass culture 64
4.1. The limits of representation 70
4.2. Showing seeing 71
Chapter 3
THE CASE OF RACHEL DOLEZAL 75
1. The Rachel Dolezal affair 77
1.1. A case of “racial fakery” 77
1.2. Dolezal’s background 80
2. Reactions to the Dolezal case 82
2.1. Blackface and cultural appropriation 82
2.2. A case of “reverse passing” 85
3. Trans identities: race and gender 91
3.1. Transgender and transracial 92
3.2. Comparing trans identities 94
Conclusions 99
List of Illustrations 103
Bibliography 105
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the centuries, the experience of race has profoundly marked the history of Europe and the United States and has played a fundamental role in the very definition of the Western world’s identity. Race is a complex, malleable concept that has been conceived and interpreted in different ways according to different historical, cultural and social contexts. Originally theorized as a biological justification for European imperialism and the institution of the Atlantic slave trade, its definition has changed over time and it is now generally accepted that race, rather than a reality grounded in biology, is an inherently social construct. It is worth noting, however, that being socially constructed does not imply that it does not exist; indeed, the concepts of race and racism are far from being eradicated, as they still have a strong influence over individuals’ lives, as well as on the organization of society as a whole.
In this work I have focused on the issue of race in the context of the United States and more specifically on how this concept has been created and deployed, from plantation slavery onward, to construct and maintain unequal relationships of power. My study is concerned in particular with the analysis of the field of representation both as a site in which the racialized order is constantly produced and reproduced, and as a potential site of resistance that holds revolutionary possibilities. The choice of the topics derives from a personal interest in the themes related to race and the experience of racism, which are increasingly debated topics not only in the United States but also in Europe, where the growing number of immigrants mainly coming from Africa forces many European countries to critically interrogate their colonialist past.
Then the focus shifts to the analysis of the inextricable link between visuality and race, as the visual field and the way we are taught to look are crucial for the production and the reproduction of racial blackness. The main argument is that the visual field, by means of the racial imagery composed by stereotypical and degrading images of the racialized Other, is the privileged site where meanings about race are constructed. The scopic regime of race, which refers to all the visual systems, either cultural, political, or technological, deployed by the dominant group to maintain power relations, has not only naturalized the decoding of human differentiation according to racial features, but it has also supported the US racial hierarchy that has posited whiteness, perceived as the unmarked human norm, at the top of the social order and blackness, conceived as an inherently degraded and abject condition, at the bottom.
learned to see blackness as degraded. Finally, the last paragraphs retrace the evolutions of the traditional stereotypical images of blackness after Emancipation and in contemporary US society following changing patterns of oppression, in order to underline the “tragic continuities” that can be identified in the constitution of blackness as an abject and threatening condition. Therefore, although the representations of blackness have changed over the centuries, they all contributed to the constant devaluation of black bodies which resurfaces continuously in today’s society, as the frequent murders of black people by the police tragically testify.
The second chapter focuses on the possibility of agency and resistance deployed by black people within the field of visuality and on the ways in which they have challenged and contested the dominant regime of representation by employing a wide range of counterstrategies. The overall idea is that in the history of the United States, black people have always been the social group whose “right to look,” to quote Nicholas Mirzoeff, has constantly been denied and repressed, but this condition did not prevented blacks from engaging in a longstanding fight to regain power over the hostile field of visuality that has created the inherent association between blackness and abjection. In this resistance struggle, the power of the dominated lies in the possibility to speak against the hegemonic representation of blackness not only by pointing to and questioning the racist stereotypical archive through which blackness is perceived, but also in the creation of alternative and counterhegemonic images in order to challenge the scopic regime of race. In order to produce an alternative visuality able to challenge the degrading archive of blackness, black people have been both the producers of images and the object of those images; in this last case, however, differently from racist representations, they were not passive objects, but they managed to control and manipulate their own images for artistic or political purposes and to support their claims.
photography’s repressive functions and crucially contributed to the deconstruction of hegemonic representations of black masculine and feminine subjectivities.
After an analysis of early attempts to challenge the racist archive of blackness, the chapter provides a theoretical introduction concerning the important role of realism and authenticity as representational counterstrategies adopted by black Americans, as well as an overview of the debate over positive and negative images which also addresses critiques highlighting the limitations of these approaches. Then, the focus shifts to the three main strategies adopted by black Americans to confront hegemonic culture: the first one is the acceptance of the stereotype and has been of particular importance for black women, who have adopted the politics of respectability as a way to resist racist depictions; the second strategy is negotiation, which has been used to adapt the stereotypes for personal benefit especially by black cultural producers and performers; the third approach is ironic appropriation and it involves the opposition of the stereotype by means of parody and irony. Finally, the last part of the chapter is concerned with the ways in which black Americans, rather than providing alternative self-representation, have directly challenged the realm of visuality itself, especially in contemporary times. The overall idea is to challenge the scopic regime of race itself by showing and uncovering the visual mechanisms through which human differentiation, racialized subjects and the black/white polar opposition are constructed by interrogating the act of seeing itself.
and by showing her actual connection with black contexts both on the public and on the personal level.
CHAPTER 1
THE REPRESENTATION OF BLACKNESS
Throughout the history of the Western world, and more specifically starting from the modern period, race has been a fundamental issue that has become inextricably linked to the concept of modernity itself. Race, as an object of study and analysis, has been addressed from different perspectives; indeed, race has been conceived as either a social construct, a scientific and empirical reality, a political strategy of control and power over a specific group or simply dismissed as non existent. Defining what race actually is, is a rather hard task and over the centuries the definition has changed according to different cultural, social and historical conditions.
However, it is undeniable that the experience of race has been and still is fundamental for the Western world’s identity and that has profoundly marked the history of Europe and the United States and the development of Western modern capitalism in general. It is an issue that not only influences peoples’ everyday life but that also persists at the academic level and that has troubled many scholars that have dealt with race, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, bell hooks, Edward Said, and Paul Gilroy just to name a few.
Race and the consequent conceptualization of racism are complex but rather flexible concepts that have influenced individuals and society as a whole on many different levels and it seems that their importance is not going to diminish anytime soon; as Howard Winant puts it: “[…] the concept persists, as idea, as practice, as identity, and as social structure. Racism perseveres in these same ways.”1 It is therefore important to understand why race and racism are still so important in today’s society by focusing on the construction and the changes of these concepts throughout history. In other words, it is necessary “to dig into the archaeology of a racial present, to know more about the
historical dynamic of race […]” as a response to “[…] a need to make sense of the current racial present in the West […].”2
While the experiences of race and racism are common to humankind itself, in this dissertation the focus will be on race and racism in the context of the United States and more specifically on the construction and representation of blackness. The main goal is to better understand how black people became the epitome of racialized bodies throughout the centuries. In order to construct the racialization of black people, the issue of representation has always been fundamental. It is clear that representations of blackness changed throughout the centuries, starting from the Atlantic slave trade, the period of plantation slavery, as well as after the emancipation. However, it is worth highlighting that they all contributed to the negative value and meaning attached to black bodies that still in today’s society haunt the lives of black people, as also testified by the recent murders of black people in the US by the police. Indeed, the constant devaluation of blackness has led to the creation of a system of unequal power relationships, as well as a society where racism is institutionalized and that is based on whiteness as the norm3.
1. The concept of race
As already noted, either in the cultural and political discourse and in the academic field, the category of race itself is difficult to define and its boundaries are blurred and not fixed. While race is almost universally acknowledged as a social construction and not a physical reality, there is no such agreement on how the concept of race should inform and influence the political, social, and cultural debate. In particular, because it is not an actual reality, there has been the claim that the concept and even the word “race” should be abandoned, placing on it what W.J.T. Mitchell defines “a veil of disavowal”4. The
progressive negation of race and the idea that race itself is insignificant has led to two different theories, namely the idea that we now live in a “post-racial era” and that of colorblind universalism. While these two arguments have entirely different implications, they share the assumption that, given its fictional nature, the traditional concept of race should not be used as an analytical tool for the study of contemporary society.
2 Ash Amin, “The Reminder of Race,” Theory, Culture and Society, 27, 2010, pp. 2-3.
3 Carolyn Finney, “Brave New World? Ruminations on Race in the Twenty-first Century,” Antipode, XLVI, 5, 2014, p. 1278.
1.1. Post-racial theory and colorblindness
The first argument is based on the belief that US society has reached what has been defined a “post-racial era”. The idea is that society as a whole has moved beyond traditional racial categories and that race is a discredited concept that entirely belongs to the past. In general, post-racial theorists5, while they acknowledge the foundational
importance of race for US society in the past, believe that today’s society is finally free from this heavy burden and from the need to use the idea of race as an analytic concept, as it has been thoroughly deconstructed.6 Using it, they maintain, is dangerous as it may
substantiate what is merely a fiction.
Many believe that the post-racial era was inaugurated by Anthony Appiah’s famous statement that “the truth is that there are no races.”7 Appiah’s work builds on classical
race theorist W.E.B. Du Bois who, at the end of the nineteenth century, was the first one to theorize race as a product of power and resistance rather than a biological inheritance in his seminal study regarding “the Negro problem.”8 Appiah attempted to complete what
he considered DuBois’ “incomplete argument” to “assimilate the unbiological nature of races” and to articulate a positive concept of race.9 With regards to the heavy burden of
race mentioned above, his main claim is that the abandonment of race as a concept would mean that society would be liberated from illogical thinking and the mystification of pseudoscience and that the periodical reemergence of presumed biological notions of race would be prevented.
Another cultural and social theorist that supports the necessity of a society that is liberated from race as a code of human categorization is Paul Gilroy. In contrast with post-racial theorists, however, he acknowledges the utopian nature of his project calling for the renunciation of race. In his essay Against Race, Gilroy states that identity and belonging must be reconfigured around post-racial thinking and therefore he champions a new “planetary humanism” based on a consciousness of shared values that do not belong
5 See, for example, the work of the Marxist sociologist Robert Miles. 6 Finney, “Brave New World?,” p. 1279.
7 Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 45.
8 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 11, 1898, pp. 1–23.
9 Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical
to racial categorizations.10 Rather, this consciousness emerges in the context of a
transnational identity that can be found at the crossroad of what he calls “the Black Atlantic” and that is a characteristic of all the people who have a diasporic past.11
On the other hand, the second argument that derives from the disavowal of race as an analytical category for the study of today’s society is the so-called “color blindness”. This idea is rooted in the belief that racial group membership and race-based differences should not be taken into account; it is especially important for current political discourse in the US when it comes to calculate the impact of race on either policy decisions, legislation, and programs. While the ideology of color blindness might seem a positive way to tackle the complex issue of race by erasing the color line, it has been proven that most of the time the consequences are entirely counterproductive.12 Indeed, the colorblind
approach, in contrast with its original intentions, results in the “silencing” of race at the public level. According to Harries, colorblindness implies the public disavowal of race and the consequence is “[…] the denial of the meanings and effects of race.”13 Therefore,
rather than an empowering concept that neutralizes racism in the public space, colorblindness hides racial dynamics and contributes to maintaining white privilege by silencing the word race itself.
The silencing of race as a category has also other negative implications: first of all, it fails to recognize any real relationships between the historical construction of race and racism and the current manifestations of these social constructions in US society.14
Secondly, it is entirely counterproductive for those who fight for racial equality, as it denies the possibility to name race and consequently to bring to light white privilege and challenge everyday racism. Finally, it is worth noting that the colorblind approach has been used with malicious intents, especially within recent political discourse. More specifically, as it has been poignantly argued by black feminist scholars in particular, colorblindness serves to hide the institutional nature of racism and to place the
10 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2002.
11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. 12 See, for example Finney, “Brave New World?”; Amin, “The Reminder of Race”; Bethan Harries, “We Need to Talk about Race,” Sociology, XLVIII, 6, 2014, pp. 1107-1122; Cornel West, Race
Matters, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993; InteRGRace, Visualità e (anti)razzismo, Padova: Padova University
Press, 2018.
responsibilities for conditions of extreme poverty, homelessness, unemployment that mainly affect African Americans on individuals rather than on the relationships of unequal power constructed throughout the centuries.15
1.2. The paradox of race
The previous paragraph has briefly showed that the idea of relegating the category of race to the past seems to be totally ineffective to recognize, address and challenge present racism. It has also showed what has been defined “the paradox of race”, namely the fact that even though the concept has been exposed as entirely false and a myth, race thinking and racism persist and resurface continuously. The idea on which many anti-racist arguments are based, that race and racism are completely irrational and that “[i]f we can just stop talking about race […] then maybe racism will disappear […] has been proven wrong.”16
Indeed, far from having moved beyond traditional racial categories, it actually seems that race still plays a fundamental role in many aspects of today’s US society. As Cornel West argues in his most famous (and self-explanatory) work Race Matters, “[t]he astonishing disappearance of the event from public dialogue is testimony to just how painful and distressing a serious engagement with race is.”17
In other words, while race is fiction, it is a fiction with great power on the lives of racialized people; it
[…] is indeed a myth but one that, like all myths, has a powerful afterlife that continues to structure perception, experience, and thought and to play a real role in history. […] A myth is not simply a false belief, an epistemological mistake. It is a powerful story that endures over many generations, subject to endless reinterpretation and reenactment for new historical situations.18
Given the fictional but powerful nature of race, within the academic field, there is no general agreement on if and how to use this analytical category. For example, for Gilroy, there is no recuperating or redeeming, no readily de- or re-signifying the concept of race, while other scholars believe that the concept of race itself carries revolutionary possibilities. These possibilities can be used as tools for the rise of a counterculture, to
15 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press, 1992. 16 Mitchell, Seeing through Race, p. XII.
17 West, Race Matters, p. 262.
engage systemic and structural processes of racialization and ultimately for another “doing” of race.19 In order to recognize and challenge the various types of racism that
permeate current society and to move beyond the “cul-de-sac of the post-racial era”20, it
is necessary to uncover, discover, and name race as a cultural device to create a hierarchical order of power relationships.21
It is therefore clear that a post-racial or colorblind society is far from being reached and that race still influences many aspects of everyday life, making present society intensely marked by racial categories. As Amin puts it:
[i]f race thinking and acting, depressingly, has become ingrained in vernacular and institutional practice due to the force of stacked legacies of reading human difference and worth in racial terms, the journey to a non-racial future may prove to be one of misplaced hope and disappointment, and certainly a very long and arduous one.22
In the next paragraphs, specific attention will be devoted to the creation of the concept of race, and in particular of racial blackness in the United States. The focus will be on the importance of representation and the visual field for the construction of the racialized Other starting from the period of colonialism and the slave trade.
2. Visuality and race
Race has been proven to be an illusion; it is inconsistent at the biological level, since there are no valid scientific definitions or the evidence that humankind can be divided according to specific phenotypical characteristics; what is more, it is an entirely illogical concept at the ethics level, as there is no correlation between physical characteristics and one’s inclinations or behavior.23 Yet, in every aspect of US society
race is pervasive and persists as a longstanding and mutable construction; as Richard Dyer puts it: “[r]ace is not the only factor […], but it is never not a factor, never not in play.”24
In other words, notwithstanding the fictional nature of race, it is almost impossible not to read reality according to racial traits. It has been almost universally acknowledged that the fact that race still plays a fundamental role in everyday experience, and especially for
19 Finney, “Brave New World?,” p. 1277. 20 Mitchell, Seeing through Race, p. XII.
21 Annalisa Frisina, “Introduzione”, in InteRGRace, Visualità e (anti)razzismo, p. 3. 22 Amin, “The Reminder of Race,” p. 13.
23 Anna Scacchi, “Vedere la razza/fare la razza,” in Bordin E. and Bosco S., A Fior di Pelle:
Bianchezza, Nerezza, Visualità, Verona: ombre corte, 2017, p. 18.
the lives of racialized people, derives from the fact that it is a powerful and continuously self-repeating social construction.
The creation and the ceaseless reproduction of the concept of race began during the colonialist period and the Atlantic slave trade and its main aim was to justify the violent brutalization of black bodies by making them seem less than human, according to specific physical traits.25 As already stated, the legacy of this imposed racialization still haunts the
lives of black people. It is therefore clear that racial imagery has been purported and maintained by strong power relationships that support the hierarchy created between the different races, even after the concept of race itself has been dismantled.
One of the factors that make race so difficult to erase from social and political discourse and everyday practice is the fact that, differently from other sources of discrimination, such as sexual orientation, it is a visual marker, something that can be identified by using sight. This idea, however, could imply that we are able to identify physical characteristics, such as hair, the shape of the nose and the lips, etc. that are specific of a particular group of people, something that is in fact not possible. As a matter of fact, we are able to ‘see’ race because the way we look at thing is not neutral but is itself informed by the racial imagery that society supports and perpetuates.26 It is therefore
clear that there is an inextricable link between visuality and race and that “there is power in looking.”27
2.1. Critical studies of race and visual culture studies
In the last decades, it has been poignantly argued by many theorist and scholars that the visual field and the way we look are crucial for the production and the reproduction of race.28 The first statement made by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright in their work
about visual culture is that “[e]very day we engage in practices of looking to make sense
25 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2011, p. 63.
26 Judith Butler, “Endangered/endangering: schematic racism and white paranoia,” in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 18.
27 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, p. 115.
28 See for example Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, New York-London: Routledge, 1999; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation; Dyer, White; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” Journal of Visual Culture, I, 2, 2002, pp. 165-181; Michelle Shawn Smith, “Visual Culture and Race,” MELUS, XXXIX, 2, 2014 pp. 1-11; Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Visions:
of the word.”29 While it might seem a rather obvious assertion, its implications are far
more complex. In particular, it implies that it is through the inherently social practice of looking that we negotiate social relationships, as well as the meaning and the value attached to what we see.
Within the academic field, the link between visuality and race has been tackled from different points of view. The most traditional perspective focuses on the study of “the spectacle of racism” and the history of racist representations that range from artwork to images and texts that normalize and perpetrate human hierarchy into different races. On the other hand, however, the most interesting and innovative theories regarding visuality and race are the result of an interdisciplinary effort shared by two distinct field, namely critical studies of race and visual culture studies.30 The main focus of the two fields is
different, as critical race studies are concerned with the social construction of race throughout the centuries and in contemporary society, while visual culture interrogates the act of seeing and what it means to perform this act. Hal Foster, in the introduction of a seminal collection of essays about visual culture, differentiates between vision, i.e. sight as a physical operation, and visuality, i.e. sight as a social fact that is constructed by social, cultural and historical factors, what he defines “its discursive determinations.”31
The fruitful encounter of these two fields of study, therefore, brings together the question of visuality and race, arguing that since sight is a social practice, it is also a racialized practice; in a nutshell, they try to move beyond an analysis of racial representation per se, and instead to investigate “how subjects adopt racial positions as they learn how to look.”32 Racialization, therefore acts not only upon the object of view
but also on the viewer, as she/he adopts cultural and historical racial codes to interpret reality. Indeed, seeing cannot be considered just a passive action and reception performed by our eyes, but most importantly seeing implies interpreting what is in front of us through specific social, cultural, and historical codes and assigning a certain value to the subject of our looking.33 In the words of the feminist scholar Judith Butler, there is at play “a
racial schematization of the visible field” that makes seeing not an unmediated or neutral
29 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction of Visual Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 9.
30 Smith, “Visual Culture and Race,” p. 1.
31 Hal Foster, “Preface,” in Vision and Visuality, Washington: Bay Press, 1988, p. IX. 32 Smith, “Visual Culture and Race,” p. 2.
action, not “[…] an act of direct perception, but the racial production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means to see.”34
2.2. Race as medium
The connection between race and visuality is best explained by Nicole Fleetwood when she asserts the performative nature of the visual sphere, since seeing race, as already noted, is not a transparent act, but rather “it is itself a ‘doing.’”35 Following the same
logic, W.J.T. Mitchell, one of the most important scholars of visual studies, proposes to see race as a medium, a filter through which we interpret and classify humanity according to supposed racial differences.36 The general aim of Mitchell’s work is to reveal and
de-naturalize the act of seeing itself, claiming for the need to “show seeing”, that is to say “[…] to overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing[…]”; to show that our vision is informed by social and cultural constructions that we apply and reproduce in our everyday practice of seeing. In other words, seeing is not natural and objective, rather it is a mediated activity that it is “learned and cultivated” in a specific cultural, social, aesthetic and political context.37 Therefore, race can be
understood as a lens through which we make sense of human differences and that creates power relationships of hierarchy; the visual field, is itself a hegemonic racial formation38
that constructs the racialized Other through
stereotypes, caricatures, classificatory figures, search images, mappings of the visible body, of the social spaces in which it appears […]. These images are the filters through which we recognize and of course misrecognize other people.39
In the context of the United States, these images have become part of the collective imagination, starting from the period of plantation slavery and their target was usually the epitome of the racialized Other, that is to say the black person. These “controlling images”40 contributed to the construction of a specific idea of what blackness and being
black means and implies; it is worth noting that the meaning attached to blackness, as
34 Butler, “Endangered/endangering,” p. 16. 35 Fleetwood, Troubling Visions, p. 7. 36 Mitchell, Seeing through Race. 37 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” p. 166. 38 Butler, “Endangered/endangering,” p. 17. 39 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” p. 175.
40 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
well as the representations of black people, changed continuously throughout the centuries, according to the social and political situation. In addition, images of blackness were, and still are, different depending on gender, as within US society the controlling images of black men and women served to justify different kinds of subjugation and violence.41 Therefore, as Herman Gray states, blackness is not a monolithic concept but
it is a “[…] cultural signifier that […] remains open to multiple and competing claims”, since it refers “to the constellation of productions, histories, images, representations, and meanings associated with black presence in the United States.”42
In the next paragraphs, these images and the ways in which they have changed over time will be analyzed, while the next chapter will address the way in which racial images and representations can be used to subvert the dominant and controlling gaze. However, before moving on to the analysis of stereotyped images, it is worth tackling some theoretical issues regarding the ways in which the hegemonic white gaze creates a regime that naturalizes human differences, namely the scopic regime of race.43
3. The scopic regime of race
W.J.T. Mitchell in his attempt to “show seeing”, points to the importance to acknowledge that, as already stated, the visual field is a social construction but that the opposite is also true, namely the importance of the visual construction of the social field; the fact that “[i]t is not just that we see the way we do because we are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do because we are seeing animals.”44
In the same way, it is possible to claim that we see races because, as humans, we organize the reality in visual terms and vision is naturalized as “a primordial tool of human perception and thus differentiation.”45 Indeed, notwithstanding its inconsistence,
we see and define race primarily by specific physical traits, such as the shape of the nose, the lips and in particular the color of the skin. In creating the black subject, therefore, the
41 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
42 Herman Gray, “Black Cultural Politics and Commercial Culture,” in Herman Gray, Watching
Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, p. 12.
43 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality, Washington: Bay Press, pp. 3-23.
visual field is crucial; from the very beginning of the racial thinking that started with European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, bodily characteristics and the color of the skin played a fundamental role, as they soon became the exterior evidence of an internal difference.46
The creation, theorization, and perpetration of racial blackness as an inescapable visual marking47 is best understood by using the notion of “scopic regime”, which was
first theorized by film theorist Christian Metz, later expanded by cultural theorist Martin Jay and finally used in the field of black and critical race studies.48 In general, the concept
of scopic regime is a theoretical framework to discuss “the power of looking and optical tools to assess, surveil, and represent the visual world.”49 The scopic regime, in other
words, places the visual field and the gaze at the center of dynamics of power and hegemony. This notion turns out to be extremely useful when discussing issues of race and the creation of hierarchies based on racial differences. Indeed, theorists that discuss the issue of blackness and the visual field have created the concept of the scopic regime of race, which refers to all the visual systems, either cultural, political, or technological deployed by the dominant group to maintain power relations and make not only possible, but also natural the decoding of human differentiation according to racial features.50 The
importance of the technological apparatus should not be underestimated; it is worth noting, however, that many scholars have focused on how optical technologies, especially photography, have been used to define and discipline racialized bodies.51 As Fleetwood
puts it,
[v]ision and visual technologies, in this context, are seen as hostile and violent forces that render blackness as aberration, given the long and brutal history of black subjugation through various technologies, visual apparatus among them.52
As already noted, the archive of images and representations on which a specific scopic regime is based may change considerably over time. However, there are dynamics of
46 Scacchi, “Vedere la razza/fare la razza,” p. 21.
47 Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 215.
48 Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” 49 Fleetwood, Troubling Visions, p. 17.
50 Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
51 See for example Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest, New York: Routledge, 1995.
power that can be retraced in every visual regime and, with regards to the construction of blackness, it is worth highlighting that there are common features that can be retraced in the visual archive.
3.1. Naturalization
The scopic regime of race in the United States creates a reality that is undeniably organized according to racial codes. However, this state of things can only be maintained and reproduced by hiding the carefully arranged hierarchy between racialized groups of people, as well as the dominant structuring principles that underline this imposed hierarchy.53 In other words, the practices of looking and interpreting reality through an
inherently racist ideology are made to seem natural and inevitable.54 In this way, racial
hierarchies are not questioned because the way in which they are constructed and maintained are hidden under the veil of the naturalization of human difference.55
As Ash states, “[t]he details of colour, shape, smell, behaviour, disposition, intent, picked out by racial scopic regimes as tellers of human grouping and social standing – etched over a long historical period across a spectrum of communication media” become progressively natural and given.56 Therefore, within the visual field, race is constructed
as something given and it is “made to appear as if it has always existed, thereby denying [its] coerced and cultivated production.”57 Through the naturalization of the differences
the cultural hegemony maintains its power while keeping hidden the strategies that underline the visual system of racial marking.
In order to make the scopic regime of race visible, it is necessary to question the supposed natural hierarchy of sight by historicizing vision and specifying its dominant practices. According to Foster, the strategies deployed by the racial scopic regime can only be uncovered and questioned through “the recognition that vision has a history” 58
and that the each scopic regime, far from being given or natural, has always been contested by alternative visual regimes that were constructed on a critical and oppositional gaze. The ways in which the racialized field of vision has been questioned
53 Barrett, Blackness and Value.
54 Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, p. 23. 55 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, p. 6.
56 Amin, “The Reminder of Race,” p. 8. 57 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, p. 67.
and challenged and how black people have always been struggling not only for more realistic representations, but also for their own “right to look”59 will be the main themes
of the next chapter.
3.2. Hypervisibility
It has been argued that, in US visual culture, African Americans are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible.60 This paradox is the direct consequence of the ways in which
the racial scopic regime constructs black subjectivity and subjugates blacks through visual coding. Indeed, on the one hand black subjects are a visible and troubling presence, as they are defined by their inescapable racial markings.61 On the other hand, in order to
maintain power relations, their presence is constantly denied at every level of society. This longstanding paradox is best described by the notion of hypervisibility that is frequently used in black cultural studies to
[…] describe processes that produce the overrepresentation of certain images of blacks and the visual currency of these images in public culture. It simultaneously announces the continual invisibility of ethical and enfleshed subjects in various realms of polity, economies, and discourse, so that blackness remains aligned with negation and decay.62 Therefore, black people are always exposed and almost impossible not to see, as “the very markers that reveal you to the rest of the world, your dark skin and your kinky/curly hair, are visual.”63 At the same time, they are underexposed and marginalized
and black experience is constantly excluded from political and ethical life, making them invisible in the history of the United States, as well as in current public discourse and representations.64
59 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look.
60 See for example David Marriot, Hunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007; Fleetwood, Troubling Visions; Smith, “Visual Culture and Race;” bell hooks, Black Looks.
61 Barrett, Blackness and Value. 62 Fleetwood, Troubling Visions, p. 16.
63 Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” cited in Fleetwood, Troubling Visions, p. 15.
3.3.Whiteness as the norm and white privilege
The scopic regime of race makes it natural to see and interpret human differentiation in racial terms. In particular, in the context of the United States, but not exclusively, the concept of race is articulated in the visual field around the binary opposition of black and white. It is worth noting that this optical paradigm is organized around two colors that are entirely abstract; indeed, the black/white opposition is the extreme simplification of a spectrum of colors in which the two opposite poles do not even exist.65 Nonetheless,
racialized visuality acts as if black and white and the meanings that they carry are real. As seen in the previous section, the scopic regime of race, in this polar opposition, constructs black skin as hypervisible, but what is important to highlight is that, consequently, whiteness is perceived as the unmarked norm, the ordinary, the standard. In other words, hypervisibility is a condition that only affects black people exactly because they are the ones who are ‘read’ in racial terms, while “[…] white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.”66
In his pioneering work about the history and the meanings attached to whiteness, Richard Dyer explains that in a visual culture that is based on the visual field as source of knowledge and power, “[t]here is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human”67
and therefore being visible as white means being in a position of privilege. In a certain way, it could be argued that also whiteness is both visible and invisible: on the one hand, being visible as white is itself a “passport to privilege”; on the other hand, being perceived as the human norm implies that racial superiority resides in that which cannot be seen. In other words, it is in unseen whiteness that resides power and there is no stronger and more secure position of power than that of the watcher.68 As a consequence, according to Dyer,
in order to reveal and challenge the racial hierarchy, it is not enough to analyze and question the stereotypes around which blackness has been constructed, but it is also imperative to make whiteness “strange,” to identify white people as racialized subjects
65 Scacchi, “Vedere la razza/fare la razza,” p. 19. 66 Dyer, White, p. 1.
67 Ivi, p. 2.
and ultimately, “to make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence […].”69
Dyer, in his project to make whiteness strange, takes inspiration from the short essay
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack written by Peggy McIntosh in 1989,
in which she draws a list of everyday situations that show how being white gives her access to a series of unearned advantages that only derive from being identified as white.70
More importantly, she argues that white people are taught not to see these assets and are made to believe that their accomplishments depend on their individual characteristics only. Because white people seem unable to see their white privilege it is necessary to unpack this “invisible weightless knapsack” and to show whiteness not only as a privilege but also as a position of power that reproduces the racial hierarchy.71
4. The construction of the Other
[M]y experience of being a young black girl was one of living in relationship to images of blackness and black subjects that circulated broadly in the public sphere. As a child, I knew that I had no control over these images and how they were disseminated, but that many of my interactions in public spaces, with blacks and non-blacks, would be in conversation with these images. I also knew that those images, more often than not, presented a challenge to my existence […]72
This quote taken from Nicole Fleetwood’s work about the iconicity of blackness, shows how blackness is an inherently social and cultural production; race is perpetually reproduced and naturalized through a longstanding and complex visual archive that translates in visual terms the racial ordering of reality.73 Indeed, the hierarchical definition
of human differentiation relies on a set of images that can be ‘read’ in the black skin. The hegemonic white gaze, therefore, by using the filter of race produces and reproduces blackness as an actual “epidermal scheme.”
69 Hazel Carby, “The multicultural wars,” cited in Dyer R., White, p. 3.
70 Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” Peace and Freedom
Magazine, July/August 1989, pp. 10-12.
71 Outside the academia, the project of making whiteness strange and to challenge the equation of being white with being human can be retraced in the recent campaigns for inclusive make-up. Indeed, most of the colors and shades are tested and created for a ‘standard’ white audience and cannot be used by people with darker skin in the same ways. However, in the last years, also thanks to the influence of pop stars, such as Rihanna or Beyoncé, there has been a huge movement for the production of make-up that takes into account all shades of skin colors.
72 Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination, New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 2015, p. 1.
4.1. The Fanonian moment and double consciousness
The power of the hegemonic white gaze, that is the power of the spectator74, fixes the
meanings and values attached to blackness in the hyper visible sign of the black skin. In order to explain the mechanisms that inscribe the race on the skin of black people, many studies of black visuality and race take as their starting point Black Skin, White Masks by the French intellectual Franz Fanon written in 1952, and in particular an anecdote that is considered an actual racial primal scene. In this scene, that Fleetwood calls “the Fanonian moment,”75 the black body is imprisoned by the gaze of a white child:
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity […]. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships […]76
In this anecdote, there are several aspects that have become fundamental for both race and visual studies. Fanon exemplifies the huge power of the white gaze to imprison the black body in the hyper visible sign of the skin77. Through the hegemonic gaze, the black
subject is deprived of his/her individuality in the process of epidermalization, which Stuart Hall defines as the literal “inscription of race in the skin.”78 Race is therefore not
only the object of a gaze, but it is produced by the gaze itself.
74 bell hooks, Black Looks, p. 117. 75 Fleetwood, Troubling Visions, p. 21.
76 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952], p. 84-85.
77 Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value, Hanover (NH): Dartmouth College Press, 2013.
78 Stuart Hall, “The After-Life of Franz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White
Masks?,” in Alan Read, (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Franz Fanon and Visual Representation, Seattle: Bay
Racial recognition, that is the process of recognition of the black subject as such, therefore, can only be painful, as it is mediated by the gaze of the white person that has constructed the concept of blackness through the visual archive of degrading racial images. The black subject comes to self-knowledge and discovers his/her blackness by being identified as black by an external gaze (“Look, a Negro!”) and by the perpetual production and circulation of a visual narrative that sketches an “historical-racial schema” on the black body.
The skin and the body, therefore, carry the cultural meaning of blackness as a denigrated position, but the elements that constitute this racial schema, as Fanon states, “had been provided for me […] by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.”79 Within these dynamics of seeing and being seen,
emerges one of the foundational features of African American identity, namely the concept of “double-consciousness.” It was first used by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of
Black Folk to explain this “sense to see oneself through the eyes of others”80 that
permeates so clearly Fanon’s racial primal scene and that he calls a “third-person consciousness.”81 Double-consciousness, though painful, is an inescapable condition for
black people that are forced to internalize the codes and meanings of the process of racial recognition imposed by the white gaze. As Hall puts it, “[t]hey had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’.”82 However, as it will be argued more in detail
in chapter two, it is worth noting that black subjects, throughout US history, have always challenged the authority of the gaze and have claimed for themselves the position of a seeing subject that creates meanings in the visual field through their oppositional gaze.83
4.2. Stereotyping and the representation of Otherness
Race, in order to maintain its power, must be continuously reproduced so that it is perceived as natural, as something given that cannot be questioned. The reproduction of race, as already stated, relies mainly on the visual field as the privileged site where meanings about race are constructed and racial hierarchies and classifications are
79 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 84.
80 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 1903. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.
81 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 83.
imposed.84 The US racial order relies on the representation of the black subject through a
set of stereotypical images that have been produced throughout the centuries starting from the period of plantation slavery. There is, therefore, a strong connection between dynamics of domination and representation; as bell hooks states: “[f]rom slavery on, white supremacists have recognized that control over images is central in the maintenance of any system of racial dominion.”85
The major strategy for the ideological and social construction of the black subject as completely Other is stereotyping. The philosopher Homi Bhabha, in his famous essay “The Other Question”, states that stereotyping is a mode of representation that is based on the concept of fixity: the Other is constructed as a fixed and unchanging reality that only carries a specific meaning (e.g., bestiality, sexual depravation, primitivity, etc.). What it is important to highlight, however, is the fact that the power of stereotypical discourse resides in the ambivalent way in which it works. On the one hand, the fixed reality of the other is presented as given and natural, thus constructing a “regime of truth;”86 on the other hand, stereotype is a form of knowledge that must be anxiously
repeated in order to be perceived as real and to have the power to create and maintain racial hierarchies.
It is clear that stereotyping is a crucial element in the exercise of symbolic power, as it reduces the subordinated social groups to a few, simple, and essential characteristics, which are presented as fixed by nature. Moreover, it contributes to the maintenance of the racialized order by setting symbolic boundaries between “[…] the 'normal' and the 'deviant', […] the 'acceptable' and the 'unacceptable', what 'belongs' and what does not or is 'Other', between 'insiders' and 'outsiders', Us and Them.”87 Within the scopic regime of
race that prioritizes the visual field as creator of meanings, it is obvious that the key signifier of racial difference in the stereotype is also the most visible, namely skin. As the “Fanonian moment” already showed, skin becomes the epidermal scheme, a visible sign of the Other’s inferiority and degeneracy.88
84 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, p. 511.
85 bell hooks, Black Looks, p. 3.
86 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 2001.
87 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997, p. 258.
Degrading images of Otherness, and in particular of blackness, have always been used as one of the main justifications for the oppression and the exploitation of black people in the United States.89 Moreover, the social construction of this inherent opposition is also
crucial for the creation of whiteness; indeed, it could be argued that whiteness exists and has a specific meaning only when it is set against the racialized black Other.90 The
centrality of blackness to the construction of whiteness mirrors the concept of “Orientalism” theorized by Edward Said; he believed that Europe constituted “the Orient” as a fixed and unified racial, geographical and political reality as a means through which to make sense of itself.91
In the same way, in the US context, “African Americans […] remain the negative resource of valuable white Americans,”92 meaning that whiteness has been constructed
through a process of negative recognition: while blackness carries fixed and, most of the time, degrading meanings, white people are given the privilege to see themselves in “their own infinite variety.”93 Being imprisoned in a stereotype, that is being defined by a
limited range of images, means to be denied any form of subjectivity and as a consequence to carry “the burden of representation,” as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam call it in Unthinking Eurocentrism.94 Albert Memmi, to refer to the same idea, theorized the
concept of the “mark of the plural” to explain that the racialized subject is denied the possibility to establish his/her own identity and can only be seen as one of the stereotypical images that is part of the visual archive of race; the white gaze reifies the black body as site of projection, as the very image of Otherness.95
As previously noted, the stereotype, for its message to be successful, requires that it is repeated and reproduced incessantly. Moreover, the visuality of race includes a wide range of images that are not produced in a semiotic void, but they gain meaning when they are read in context. In other words, all the images through which difference and Otherness are represented are in an intertextual relationship; as Hall argues, “they do not
89 Ivi
90 Dyer, White, p. 13.
91 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. 92 Barret, Blackness and Value, p. 31.
93 Dyer, White, p. 12.
94 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Stereotype, Realism and the Struggle over Representation,” in
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 183.
carry meaning or 'signify' on their own” but they are inextricably linked as they “gain in meaning when they are read in context, against or in connection with one another.”96
It is worth noting that this longstanding and complex visual archive continues to play a crucial role in today’s US society and it is a kind of memory of the past that is often in contrast with the official narrative of the nation. As Scacchi argues, in US public discourse and in the “official” narration of the nation the most shameful aspects, i.e. slavery, segregation, and institutionalized racism, tend to be disavowed or censured, notwithstanding the fact that they actually represent the very foundation of the economic and political power of the United States. In the visual archive, however, this ‘invisible’ past is still alive and resurfaces continuously in current representations even without the awareness of the racial history of these images; in other words, these images still hold a strong power in today’s society, as they function as a framework through which reality is perceived, and they influence society as a whole, both at the popular and at the institutional level.97
The next paragraph will be devoted to the analysis of the stereotypical images of blackness that have been constructed throughout the centuries to justify the oppression and the violence perpetrated against black people. However, before moving to the actual analysis of what the black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images,” it is important to address two theoretical issues that must be taken into account in the subsequent analysis.
First, as Shohat and Stam have argued, while it is crucial to challenge and question the stereotypical representation of blackness as a carrier of negative and degrading meanings only, the opposite movement towards the creation of “authentic” images of blackness might turn out to be problematic. Indeed, the concepts of realism and authenticity imply that there is a neutral truth, a kind of “essentially descriptive”98 truth
that could replace the stereotypical representation of blackness.99 As a matter of fact, an
ideologically neutral representation is impossible, as the “the conceptual filters through
96 Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, p. 232. 97 Scacchi, “Mettere in scena la razza,” pp. 48-49.
98 Barret, Blackness and Value, p. 43.
which forms of human otherness are mediated”100 precede any ‘authentic’ or ‘realistic’
representation.
The second theoretical aspect has to do with the limitations of the stereotype approach to tackle the issue of the representation of blackness in the United States. On the one hand, the study of stereotypes in popular culture is extremely important to reveal the oppressive patterns of discrimination that these negative portrayals carry with themselves and the fact that they function as a form of actual social control. At the same time, however, the stereotype-centered approach should not be concerned with the images alone, but also with the historical and social context from which they emerged, as well as the development that a single stereotypical image and its cultural meanings have undergone over time. Moreover, the focus on individual images might be useful to identify explicit racism but, at the same time, there is the risk that institutionally structured racism may not emerge. Therefore, while the stereotype approach remains important for the analysis of the representation of blackness, it is also crucial to take into account the broader context and focus on the role of the stereotypes within the larger configurations of power.101
5. Representations of blackness
The process of subjectification of black people and the construction of blackness as an abject condition is based on the visual representation of human difference. As seen in the previous sections, the scopic regime of race is based on stereotypical images that construct the racialized subject as something inherently Other from the Self; as a consequence, the racialized subject is perceived as something less than the human (white) norm and the hierarchical classification of humanity appears to be natural, the discursive translation of the actual ordering of the world.102
The creation of racial blackness and its negative connotations inscribed on the skin has played a crucial role in the construction of Western modernity and represents the very basis of the United States as a nation. The production and reproduction of classificatory and stereotypical figures have a long history with roots in the European imperialist project
100 Mitchell, Seeing through Race, p. XII.
and the Atlantic slave trade. The visual representation of black subjects as degraded human beings had a fundamental role in maintaining power relationship; as Barret states, “[…] the scopic is a preeminent cultural matrix of power and order.”103 Throughout the
centuries, the stereotypical images and their related meanings developed, according to the changing social order that needed to be maintained; however, as Hartman argues, there is an “amazing continuity” in the “injurious constitution of blackness,”104 whose aim is to
give a supposedly rational explanation to racism and subjugation, both in the past and in today’s US society.
The final part of the chapter will address the historical construction of the visual archive of race, starting from the Enlightenment period and with a specific focus on the stereotypes of blackness that originated during slavery and the ways in which they survived and developed after emancipation.
5.1. Enlightenment and scientific racism
The visual representation of human difference and the idea of an existing racial hierarchy becomes popular and widely accepted starting from the Enlightenment era. In their effort to classify human knowledge according to supposedly ‘rational’ principles, Enlightenment thinkers were the first to organize human diversity systematically in hierarchical terms. In order to do so, they applied the new paradigm of natural history, that was first conceived for the classification of plants and animals, to humankind itself. Therefore, during the Enlightenment period, elaborated concepts of race began to be developed and the inherent difference among ‘human species’ started to be perceived as an incontrovertible scientific truth that was mainly based on visual evidence.105 It is in
this period that the Enlightenment thought about the hierarchical order of races based on a supposed purity, replaces previous notions that served to justify the oppression and enslavement of black people, such as Boemus’ biblical theory of the curse of Ham.106
103 Barret, Blackness and Value, p. 216. 104 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, pp. 8-9. 105 Dyer, White, p. 17.
These ideas about racial purity based on a new kind of scientific evidence were also perceived as aesthetic criteria that linked the superiority of the white race to the standards of beauty of classical art. While white people were perceived as the pinnacle of the human race that carried a symbolic sense of aesthetic superiority, other races were often compared to animals and reduced to inherent inferiority and bestiality. At the mundane level, in popular representations, ideas about the racial superiority of white people were supported by images that created the association between white skin and purity, cleanness, civilization and beauty; in the same way, dark skin was linked to dirtiness, primitivity and barbarism.107
The concept of race developed in the eighteenth century took hold in the nineteenth century in the theorization of scientific racism, a field of study that was inextricably
107 McClintock, Imperial Leather; Anna Scacchi, “Le figlie di Hagar: la rappresentazione del corpo femminile nero negli Stati Uniti,” in Camilla Cattarulla (ed.), Identità americane: corpo e nazione, Roma: Cooper, 2006, pp. 21-22.
Figure 1: Apollo Belvedere, Negro, Young
bound to the technological innovations that characterized this century. Nineteenth-century racist thought, though it continued the tradition intertwining science and aesthetics to explain racial superiority, was more concerned with proving the inherent biological difference through measurable distinctions (Fig. 1). Scientific racism included a wide range of disciplines, such as phrenology, craniology, anthropometry and genetics whose goal was to provide scientific ground to the visual evidence of the racial moral inferiority of blacks, that was inscribed in their body, in their very physical characteristics.108
Integral to the project of scientific racism to explain racial difference in visual terms, is the exhibition of real black people, who were presented as the embodiment of Otherness and difference. The most famous case is that of the African woman Saartje Baartman, who was also ironically known as “The Hottentot Venus” (Fig. 2). This exhibition of the racialized body was perceived at the popular level as an actual “racial spectacle”, reproduced in cartoons and illustrations, but gave also the possibility to the proponents of scientific racism to demonstrate her racial inferiority by measuring and
108 William Fitzhugh Brundage, Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of
American Popular Culture, 1890-1930, University of North Carolina Press, 2011, pp. 70-71.
